victory, even in defeat
There’s something strange about the way the right approaches defeat, no matter how decisive; they wish it away by pretending, loudly and fervently, determined to bring poor Tinkerbell back to life by the power of belief alone. Facts are stupid things to them, as we’re all aware. But so are elections, polls, and the goddamned orbit of the earth, and nobody’s supposed to notice. This aberrant behavior, unfortunately, is generally treated in the media with the same kid gloves the family of an Alzheimer’s victim affords Grandma when she waxes lyrical about something that everyone knows never happened. A wall of pity-laced indulgence seems always to protect the Right from the truth, and it really shows in the way they act, especially lately.
At least a dozen years ago, a string of hateful, anti-sex (whether abortion or gays were the target, I don’t recall) ballot initiatives here in Oregon were simultaneously going down to ignominious defeat in both courts and public opinion, and a more than usually scary trailer park state legislator, Marylin Shannon, darkly intoned that soon, all the judges, voters, trees, and fire hydrants that stood in the way of her righteous jihad would lay bleeding on the battlefield, and Oregon would become the fascistic theocracy she envisioned. Since God was on her side, this just must be true. Her bizarre overconfidence kind of scared me at the time. Did she know something I didn’t?
No. Today, Oregon’s Republicans have been turned out of every statewide office and could pretty much meet in a phone booth. But you have to hand it to the righties for their loyalty to the team, and as Glenn Beck put it, believing in something, even if it isn’t true. Personally, I find humor in this. Witness the reaction to Rush Limbaugh’s “threat” to leave New York. Gov. Paterson regretted not doing it sooner. Jon Stewart offering his EZPass. Ed Schultz, who just got his own show on MSNBC a scant few weeks after Bill O’Reilly’s noxious radio show was cancelled, being offered Rush’s apartment, which was laughed off in a torrent of jokes about fumigation and drug-sniffing dogs. Comedy gold, if you’re not an idiot.
Like Wile E. Coyote, these righties just pop open an umbrella as the anvil hurtles toward their head, secure in the knowledge that the next ACME gadget is going to turn things around, once and for all. You have to hand it to them. They really know how to make lemonade out of lemons.
Back when Bush’s razor-thin and probably manipulated “victory” over John Kerry by a point or two was hallowed as an historic mandate, cracks were already forming in the Power of Positive Thinking on the right. Did that stop them? Noooo. Wall Street was going to swoop in and save Social Security, not. Gov. Blanco singlehandedly drowned New Orleans, not. Karl Rove’s inscrutable “math” would relegate Democrats, and all opposition, toast in 2006, not. These laughable ideas, needless to say, were treated with utmost Seriousness amongst the pancaked gasbags, even after the fact, a bizarre tradition that continues to this day.
Now we’re told that Obama’s victory was actually a vindication of Bush, because Bush and McCain weren’t really “conservative.” and unfortunately Obama has not done enough to push back against such idiocy, and more disturbingly, let a lot of it stand.
One wonders what, if anything, would ever look like defeat to a righty. Sadly, no one has the guts to tell them, and nobody, but nobody, will ever show them. Maybe they do know something I don’t know.
Facts are stupid things to them, as we’re all aware. But so are elections, polls, and the goddamned orbit of the earth orbit of the earth…
I’ve often wondered what was responsible for that bit of wobbliness in the earth’s axis, as well as the precession. Perhaps you have hit upon it here. GOP Resistance. It appears to be a force of nature. Practically elemental.
You can bet they’ll be blowing bubbles to hold up that pesky collapsing ice shelf in Antarctica, too. Global cooling strikes again.
And yet…how many decades did we spend in the wilderness, living off locusts and honey, waiting for reality to fall in on them? Who among us didn’t doubt our own sanity, at one dark moment or other during that long exile?
Not this child, I can tell you….
Certainly not me, WT. I’m generally known for my stoicism and ennui, but the runup to the Iraq war, dragging so ceaselessly and unstoppably as it did, often left me on the verge of tears. Pointless death, rolled out like a new deodorant, and everyone wanted to try it. The sense of futility and its attendant guilt were often overwhelming.
Would that I were confident things were really changing now.
Ditto. I cannot tell you how grateful I was for Salon in those very early days of darkness (the Clinton saga), when that was one of the few places you could easily find a voice or two of sanity.
Then, Krugman came along, and gradually a few more at a time.
And then there was Glenn, and a bunch of us feel as if we have met one another.
(Hey, WT!)
And we’re all richer for it, albeit not in a tax-bracket way. But man, did I misunderestimate the damage Bush would do.
Even Krugman did that. We all did, except maybe Molly. And Helen.
I still have a clipping of a column, now yellowed from the coffee pot below, taped to the inside of a cabinet door entitled “Dead Parrot Society,” where Krugman made the then-bold assertion the the Bushies liked to lie. And another, an NYT lead editorial entitled, “War in the Ruins of Diplomacy,” published right before the disastrous Iraq war inexorably started. What a dreadful decade it’s been.
Yeah, there were many people who made it more bearable. I remember reading one of be-bop’s early hymns — that’s the way I thought of it at the time — to his own long journey after Vietnam. Back when he was brotherbruz, it was that long ago.
Until that moment, I don’t think I really understood what redemption was, or honesty either, for that matter. It haunted me for a long time, but it also made me glad to be a human being, and even more determined to defend those who can’t, or won’t, content themselves with being truncated drones.
Hey yourself. Good to see you here, far from the madding crowd.
It’s not as far as you think, WT…… But again let me say how glad I am that ypu’re here.
This is the nature of that particular beast. There are reports making the rounds of large spikes in weapons sales. When one is apocalyptic, and therefore “right” about all things, defeat simply isn’t in the cards. Meacham at Newsweek is currently blathering on about the drop in numbers of self-proclaimed Christians. His article is more than one page–which violates my one page rule–so I didn’t read all of it. I assume, however, that at some point he begins to lament that the America he knew (that elitist one) is suffering from the growth in hippie-dom, or some such thing.
Yes, and O’Reilly, Hannity, Beck, Rush et al have seen their audiences spike. Which isn’t so bad, I guess. All of them were much creepier, and more boring, when all they did is cheerlead for Bush. It was like Pravda and Big Brother put together.
Now we have a band of restless nativists watching FOX and stockpiling weapons. Plus ca change….
The GOP’s goal was to never let the righty win, only the wingnuts were too blind to fathom this. For instance, many Midwestern Red states were carried by anti-abortion. What if, and you know that they could have done it in 2002-03, the Republicans banned abortion? People in places like Kansas might start noticing what NAFTA, Monsanto, and Walmart were doing to them.
Oh, and don’t forget “teh ghey,” always a useful bogeyman. We had a constitutional amendment on the ballot to ban gay marriage in 2004, which passed, but ended up not helping Bush anyway. I’ve always felt that all the sex issues are in play solely for show; like the two levels of humor in a good cartoon.
The Oregon amendment passing but not helping Bush in 2004 would compare to the outcome of the Prop 8 amendment in California passing in 2008 but not helping McCain. That outcome is disturbing and confusing at the same time. In the case of the prop 8 passing I mostly blame the late to the party “No on 8″ powers that be. Because It seems a lot of people who voted ‘Yes’ had misunderstood what they were voting for. But still, many did understand and voted ‘yes’ anyway, and that is a shame.
Clearly the “No” forces were outgunned, and didn’t see what was coming from the Mormons, along with that neat trick of capitalizing on homophobia in racial minorities. Remember that creepy commercial GG posted at UT with the two little homophobes singing?
Anyway, the issue will only be resolved in the courts, just like civil rights. Hate campaigns are just too tempting for Republicans to not inflame them, endlessly rehashing the Southern Strategy.
Have they lost? They haven’t won but I’m not so sure they’ve lost.
I am deeply disheartened by the Obama administration thus far. Very deeply.
Since I was never particularly heartened in the first place, my disappointment is considerably less. I didn’t even expect Obama to win let alone pull off any of those fancy promises he was making.
Still, I can’t imagine I’d be any happier with a McCain/Palin administration, so that’s got to count for something, right?
Of course. I supported Obama, wholeheartedly, seeing a Republican defeat to be much more important than any real “change” a nominal Democrat would provide. I didn’t give any money, though, since he was already drowning in it. My bucks went to Jeff Merkley, Al Franken, No on 8, and Act Blue candidates.
Obama may be disappointing at times, but he’s no McCain/Palin.